Watchdog

Russian human rights activists opened a branch of the NGO Antiment in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, today, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports.

The main aim of the NGO -- whose name roughly translates as "down with bad cops" -- is to fight police corruption.

Evgeny Arkhipov, chairman of the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights, told an RFE/RL correspondent that the human rights situation in Ukraine is getting worse, but the experience of Russian activists may help the country to counter this trend.

In addition, Arkhipov believes that the office of the Russian NGO in Kyiv will provide an international platform for Russian citizens in order to better protect their rights.

According to Russian authorities, about 66,000 Russian citizens are hiding from prosecution abroad.

An increasing number of Russians have received refugee status in Ukraine in recent years. Among them is Olga Kudrina, the head of the Ukraine branch of the Union of Russian Political Emigrants. Kudrina fled Russia in 2006 after being sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison for hanging a banner from a Moscow hotel calling for then-President Vladimir Putin to resign.

Arkhipov said that despite the improvement in Russian-Ukrainian relations at the highest level, Russian human rights activists have a better chance of escaping political persecution by acting from the territory of Ukraine.

He noted that there are a number of Ukrainian NGOs ready to help Russian human rights activists.

The wife of an Iranian prisoner says her husband has been sentenced to death for refusing to confess to an offense he never committed, RFE/RL's Radio Farda reports.

Roudabeh Akbari told Radio Farda on May 23 that her husband, Jafar Kazemi, was taken into custody on his way home on September 18.

Akbari says authorities asked him to say he was arrested three months later and wanted him to say he had participated in the December 27 antigovernment protests in Tehran.

Those protests, held to coincide with the Shi'ite religious holiday of Ashura, deteriorated into deadly clashes between protesters and security forces.

Akbari says her husband refused to make the false confession. She says the authorities then beat him badly, breaking three of his teeth.

Akbari believes Kazemi was arrested because their son went to live at a Baghdad base of the exiled People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran (MKO). The group, grounded in Marxism and Islam, has sought to overthrow Iran's post-1979 Islamic system.

Some 3,500 MKO members reside at the base -- called Camp Ashraf -- in northern Baghdad. The U.S. government has designated MKO a terrorist organization.

Worried about their son, Akbari says she and Kazemi called him four times. However, Akbari said her husband never had any involvement with the MKO.

Akbari added that Kazemi's lawyer says that he is innocent and that there is no evidence to justify such a heavy sentence.

On May 15, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi confirmed Kazemi's death sentence, which has yet to be carried out. The death sentences of five other prisoners charged with ties to the MKO were also confirmed.

Akbari told Radio Farda that she hoped pressure on Iranian authorities could save her husband's life.

"I beg you to make my voice heard to people and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. [Please] put the Islamic republic leadership under pressure to not to execute my husband," Akbari said.